After Eli (13 page)

“Yes,” I said. I hoped Marnie was right.

“But Isabelle says that’s crap,” Jasper said.

“Once he locked us out in the hall,” Journey said. “When he was visiting. We were out there for a whole afternoon. We played eleven games of Candy Land.”

“And Journey cheated,” Jasper said. “She cheated at the Lollipop Woods.”

“If Jasper was a lollipop,” Journey said, “he would taste like soap.”

Simon had been in France for one and a half months, and he had been to the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame. He had also gone boating on the Seine and ordered croissants in cafés, and fallen in love with Andrée, who was the daughter of the family he was living with and who had not only helped him greatly improve his speaking knowledge of French but was very cute in a Continental sort of way that involved little black dresses and high-heeled shoes. Though of course he wanted Isabelle always to be his friend.

I knew the friend thing was a bad sign, from the Education Day in which Eli explained to me how to break up with a girl.

Isabelle was sitting in the porch rocker wearing skinny jeans with a hole in one knee and a floppy white shirt, and she was crying in little sobs, like she’d been crying for a long time and was tired of it but couldn’t stop. Her nose was pink, but she still looked beautiful anyway.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

Isabelle held out Simon Dewitt Paxton’s e-mail, which was crumpled up and damp.

“Read that,” she said. “I actually printed it out. I was thinking I would make this scrapbook of rejections. Boyfriends I’ve been dumped by, colleges that turn down my applications, scholarships I don’t get. Recitals I bomb in. Plays where I forget my lines. A collection of hideous failures.”

She put her head down on her floppy sleeve and began to cry again, harder.

I didn’t know what to do, so I read Simon Dewitt Paxton’s e-mail.

TO:
moonelves411

FROM:
sdp526

Dear Izzy,

It’s really hard to tell you this, but I know we promised always to be open and truthful to each other, and I know once you’ve finished reading this, you’ll really be happy for me. I’m in love. Her name is Andrée, and I know I’ve mentioned her before. Since I’m living with her family, we’ve seen a lot of each other, though at first we thought we were just good friends. But suddenly this last week we discovered that we were a lot more than that. All this time she’s been feeling about me just the way I’ve been feeling about her. Andrée said I should write right off and tell you so. So now I am.

I know now that you and I should never have thought of tying ourselves down the way we did. I know there’s someone out there for you, just as perfect as Andrée is for me, and I’m glad that now you have a chance to find him.

I hope you are having a very enjoyable summer and that we will always be friends.

SDP

“SDP?” I said. “
SDP?
This guy signs a breakup letter with his
initials
?”

Which probably wasn’t a tactful thing to say, but come on.

Anyway, it helped because it got Isabelle thinking of other people who went by their initials, like FDR and JFK and MLK, and she decided Simon had no business going by initials, since he wasn’t nearly as good as any of them.

So then I said, why didn’t we walk over to Scrubgrass Creek, because it was a beautiful day and getting out might make her feel better.

“All right,” Isabelle said. “If you don’t mind a tragic companion.”

“A tragic companion is okay,” I said.

The twins wanted to come too, but Isabelle said no, because she couldn’t stand any analogies just then.

We went down the Sowers driveway and past the pedestals, and turned right on the Fairfield Road, that was all dry and dusty, with the ditches grown up with blue chicory and yellow dandelions. Then we crossed the road and went left onto Scrubgrass Creek Road, which isn’t as much a road as a track, with potholes and rocks and grass growing up in the middle. It was cooler on the creek road because it was shady, with all the trees, though there were sunny patches too, with wild daisies and red clover.

Then Isabelle took my hand. She just reached over and wrapped her hand around mine, and I felt like my heart was going to explode. Her hand felt thin and cool and elegant, like the rest of her, and in contrast my hand felt like a ham, all sweaty and hot, but Isabelle didn’t seem to mind.

When we got to the bridge, we stopped in the middle and leaned on the splintery rail and looked down into the water. The creek was running fast and clear, with the sunlight sparkling off it in little golden blobs. In the dark under the bridge, you could see flickering shapes of fish, darting all together, then stopping, then darting in another direction. I’ve always wondered how fish knew to do that.

“Which do you think you’d be, if you were an element?” Isabelle said. “Water, fire, earth, or air?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t have the foggiest.

“You can tell by which one makes you feel transcendent,” Isabelle said. “You know. Whatever makes you feel dreamy and peaceful and magical. Is it watching ripples on a river or waves at the beach? Or is it gazing into a crackling fire or looking up at towering mountain peaks or running with the wind?”

“Which are you?” I said.

“Oh, definitely water,” Isabelle said. “If I could, I’d be a naiad, all bright and quick and glittering, with necklaces of mother-of-pearl and water lilies in my long green hair.”

I thought how I felt with the wind in my face, riding my bike down Turkey Hill.

“I guess I’d be air,” I said.

“You’d have wings,” Isabelle said, and she turned her head and looked at me with those blue, blue eyes that felt like falling into the sky. “I could see you with wings, Danny.”

And for a crazy minute I could see me with wings too, a flying boy. Zapping through the sky with Isabelle in my arms, like Superman with Lois Lane.

Isabelle bent her head and reached behind her neck and fumbled with a catch. When she straightened up, she had a necklace in her hand, the one with the broken half of a little gold heart on a thin gold chain.

“Simon has the other half,” she said. “Or anyway, he did. They’re supposed to fit together to make a whole. To remind us that when we were apart, we were only half a person without the other.”

She paused, looking down on it.

“His is probably in some trash bin at the Louvre,” she said.

I tried not to look too glad that SDP was a moron.

“I can’t imagine you ever being half a person,” I said.

Isabelle climbed up on the lowest rung of the bridge railing and dangled the necklace out over the water. “I’m thinking of Rose, the girl in
Titanic,
” she said. “How the man she loved died when the ship went down, and it was so heartbreaking. But then afterward she escaped from her horrible fiancé and lived a long and happy life, and at the very end she threw his hateful gift of a fabulous blue diamond into the ocean.”

“She should have pawned his hateful gift of a fabulous blue diamond and bought a yacht and a Ferrari,” I said. “And maybe saved the homeless and cured AIDS.”

“It was a grand romantic gesture,” Isabelle said. “It was a repudiation of false love and all that it means.”

She leaned farther over the water.

“Now I too drown false love,” she said.

And she threw the necklace hard. It spun through the air, a little streak of gold, and vanished into the creek with a tiny splash.

“Some mermaid will find it,” Isabelle said. “I only hope it doesn’t bring her bad luck.”

“She’ll be all right,” I said. “Unless she’s a French mermaid.”

Isabelle looked glum.

“I was thinking how I should have done things differently,” she said. “I should have gone to visit him. Then I thought, no, maybe it’s best to find out now that it wasn’t meant to be.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do,” I said. “Sometimes things are just beyond your control. Like that iceberg rearing up in front of the
Titanic.
”

“Andrée was the iceberg that sank my ship,” Isabelle said tragically.

“But you’re a survivor,” I said. “Now you go on and live a long and happy life.”

“My life sucks,” Isabelle said.

But she sounded better.

We found some wild strawberries and we picked them and ate them. Then I took off my sneakers and Isabelle kicked off her flip-flops and we went wading in the creek and collected all these shiny little pebbles that looked all polished and jewel-like where the water was running over them, that Isabelle wanted to take home. We picked flowers and Isabelle made a daisy chain and put it in her hair like a crown. Then she made one for me too, and I kept it on, even though one of the stems hung down and kept tickling my ear.

“Let’s never go back,” Isabelle said. “Let’s stay here forever and eat strawberries and live in a hollow tree.”

I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do than stay on Scrubgrass Creek forever with Isabelle.

“Maybe squirrels will bring us nuts,” I said. “Maybe the Moon Elves will visit.”

“We can catch fish for breakfast and make dandelion wine,” said Isabelle. “In the winter, we’ll fly south with the birds.”

“We’ll probably have to,” I said. “It gets pretty cold here in winter.”

We lay on our backs in the grass at the edge of the water, and sometimes we talked and sometimes we didn’t say anything at all, and either way it felt fine.

I thought how now this place was special to me and Isabelle, and how maybe we’d come back here again and again, year after year. Maybe we’d bring a picnic and a bottle of wine and celebrate our anniversaries, the way my mom and dad used to do at Bev’s Caf.

By then the sun had dried all our pebbles out and they’d turned dull and drab, so we put them back in the creek again.

On the way home, Isabelle suddenly stopped in the middle of Scrubgrass Creek Road and put a hand on either side of my face and pulled me toward her and kissed me on the mouth. I thought I would die right there. I could feel her hands, thin and cool on my face, which by then was way hot. She smelled like clean sheets and just-cut grass, and she tasted like strawberries and sun.

“Thank you, Danny, darling,” Isabelle said. “This was wonderful. You saved my life.”

And we held hands again all the way back to the Sowers driveway.

That was my most perfect day. That day was pure gold.

T
hen there was the party.

I had to go. It was at Ryan Baker’s, and they were having a barbecue. Any other time, I would have thought it was great, because Ryan’s mother makes this delicious homemade barbecue sauce and the Bakers have a swimming pool. And I’ve known Ryan since kindergarten.

At kindergarten graduation, Ryan and I had to do a duet of “I’m a Little Teapot,” which my parents have on videotape, including a voice-over from Eli in which he says he has to leave the auditorium for a minute due to laughing so hard that he is worried about peeing his pants. After that, Eli used to call me Teapot all the time, until we came to an agreement because I threatened to kill him with Dad’s staple gun.

Usually I am a social person. Walter says that there are seven different kinds of intelligence, one of which is interpersonal intelligence, which means you’re good at getting along with other people. Walter is pretty much of a moron there, though he has so much linguistic intelligence and logical-mathematical intelligence and visual-spatial intelligence that it probably doesn’t matter. I mean, I bet nobody ever cared if Einstein told good jokes at parties or was friendly on teams.

But I’m like my mom that way, or at least like the way my mom used to be. She always had lots of friends and liked having people over to visit. She used to have what she called rainy-day parties, where when the weather was crappy on a Saturday, she’d just call a lot of people up, and we’d all play board games and eat chili she used to cook up on the stove in this big blue pot. On our Monopoly game, Broadway and Park Place are still sort of orange from where Eli went bankrupt and spilled his chili bowl in despair.

That’s why my mom was such a good teacher, because she just understood people and liked being around them. At the end of the school year, all her kindergartners used to cry because they didn’t want to leave her and go across the hall to Ms. McKenzie, who taught first grade. Every September there were always a couple of ex-kindergartners who’d come to my mom’s room anyway, and she’d have to reason with them and talk to them about new experiences and moving on, though I think what really eventually convinced them was that Ms. McKenzie’s room has gerbils.

Peter Reilly was all pumped about the party. He and Amanda were going steady now, which meant that they spent their time draped all over each other in public and walking around with their hands in each other’s back pockets, and Peter suddenly knew more than I would ever have believed possible about girls’ underwear.

“Yvonne’s going to be there too,” Peter said. “She’s been kind of hanging around with Ron Mazzola, but Amanda says she’s really not that into him. She still likes you. So get in there, Anderson, and make your move.”